What did the vendor of your house NOT tell you (that they should have) when you came viewing?

Reading all these horror stories, I am wondering….
Is there no legal comeback against vendors who lie or omit to disclose problem neighbours or boundary disputes?
Have solicitors not done due diligence before the sale goes through?
Have buyers failed to get surveys done?

That bricks and sand had been falling down the chimney! It needed completely relined.

I never met my vendor and had only seen the house once. I knew it had been empty a long time.
Two falling-down sheds were full of rubbish and so was the cupboard under the stairs, where the floor was the rotten consistency of sponge cake.
When I had it rewired it was described as a DIY job and the asbestos roof over the bathroom (5’ square) leaked into the bath.
The estate agent described it as ‘characterful’ where ‘derelict ‘ would have been better.

Nothing. We never met the vendor and barely saw the house, despite 3 viewings, it was so full of stuff, everywhere, suggesting the vendor teetered on the edge between compulsive shopping and hoarding. We were very worried that the house might not be fully cleared, but it was. However this just revealed how filthy it was. I doubt that paintwork had been washed or the windows cleaned in decades

But then, when we quite deliberately and knowingly bought a rundown and outdated house in order to do it up, what could we have expected?

LadyBridgerton

As a corollary, have you ever done anything to vendors? Our last sale he was so difficult during the sale that we put all the keys, and a few extras, in a bag on the kitchen worktop as we left, I also removed every instruction manual for various things. Pretty know but very satisfactory!

My buyer must have had to spend a noticeable amount of time going through an absolute pile of keys I left - as I left every darn one I had and that was rather a lot (ie as I'd had in lodgers for years to start with - and so there'd been quite a bit of lock-changing done over the years). Well - better that they had every conceivable key it might have been than any missing......

I left one pile of paperwork there - every legal bit of paper I'd had re the house (again - at least they'd have whatever bit of paper it was that they needed).

Turned up at current house to find a huge file of every bit of legal paperwork ever - and that was my first hint that the neighbours would kick off about my ownership of my own garden! I got the hint that such a huge pile of paperwork must have been kept for a reason and it probably meant the neighbours were Trouble - else I wouldnt have been left with such clear proof (for most of my garden certainly) that it is "mine - so hands off". Moral of that tale being - ask to be told as much as possible about previous owners (in case you find they were all widows and mainly from the local area - where men are often deemed to "come first" by many still). But you are an always single person (sex irrelevant - as you've had decades being treated as a person - rather than a "woman"). Instant thing of "modern person" v. "their expectations you'll act like a subservient woman" = head-on clash. They finally realised I'm a 21st century "person" and not a "1950s woman" iyswim. But it took some doing to get them to stop treating me as a "woman".

Think the "trouble" when it started boiled down to two of the neighbouring households regarding themselves as a "power in the local community" and me as an outsider and so therefore they were right (in their opinion) because of being in that position of being "local"/knowing lots of people etc. That was not funny having them running round telling a pack of lies about me/trying to turn people against me because they couldnt "have their own way" any longer about my garden.

One of those households wouldnt have been too pleased that locals who don't like them proceeded to tell me all their bad points (like being alcoholics for instance) and their modern-day paperwork showed up that, though they had been there for donkeys years etc etc - it was very clear what the state of their finances was (and yep...it's things that were their fault for obvious bad money management).

Wasn't told that the roof of the block the flat I was buying in had a £1 million roof repair pending!

That wild boar would occasionally come running across the property and start tearing up the lawns!

Our house move was delayed by a month due to the vendor having a still birth.

We moved in with 2 small children and asked a gas engineer friend to check why there was a black smut around the gas fire in the sitting room. He checked and immediately condemned the fire as it was leaking carbon monoxide and the boiler was in a similar state..

I often wondered if the baby loss was due to not having the system serviced.

Madhouse should have been last house!

As a corollary, have you ever done anything to vendors? Our last sale he was so difficult during the sale that we put all the keys, and a few extras, in a bag on the kitchen worktop as we left, I also removed every instruction manual for various things. Pretty know but very satisfactory!

In our madhouse the kitchen ceiling vowed slightly so we had someone in to fix it. Our daughter was off school I'll and she suddenly heard a massive noise and a lot of swearing! When he started to remove the ceiling he'd been covered in rubble, when the extension was done instead of clearing rubble it was left in the cavity between the kitchen ceiling and daughter's bedroom above, probably why it was bowing, he removed 4 big sackloads of stuff.

Yep....I've read more than one place that the first thing that carbon monoxide does is send someone to sleep...

This was confirmed by the fact that I'd joined a man I'd been chatting with at his table at a hotel for breakfast - and that was the sort of job he did and he was not unused to being there at the aftermath of "carbon dioxide incidents" and confirmed they do indeed happen as accidents sometimes....

That the central heating was controlled by Nest, which she took with her when she left. Took us and a central heating engineer a few days to work out why no heating.

The garage roof had a hole in it! Garages are in a separate block and I didn't think to ask to look inside

As an aside Re carbon monoxide. Many years ago we ( my boyfriend at the time) were staying on his boat, a friend was also staying.
As it was a bitterly cold night we left a Tilly bowl fire heater on.
The fire run out of fuel so the flame went out but as it was still pumped up it was emitted fumes.
If it hadn’t been for a friend on the boat next door wondering why we were late up came knocking finding us unconscious.
Long story short the Dr advised to Allways have a monitor in your bedroom. Reason being most people who die by carbon monoxide poisoning are asleep before they are aware.

J52

The log burner was illegally installed and had never been swept. Our Heating engineer refused to touch it! We replaced it immediately. The teenage son’s room had a wall of blown plaster hidden by a huge poster.

My first thought was that scene in the Shawshank Redemption .

Iur house had been repossessed and was boarded up when we viewed it but we would have liked to know the haphazard way the wiring had been done.

Ladyleftfield - so much for any idea of "Let's have a celebratory meal at home tonight for moving in". More like = "Agh! It's so filthy it might make us ill - where's the nearest restaurant?"

There is a strange concrete box in the wall of my garage .still don’t know what it is….

A long time ago now -but the vendor neglected to tell me that the immediate neighbour went into his garden without permission and when he rowed with him -he smashed his face breaking his nose .
It went to court .
The neighbour was sued for assault.
After I moved in people warned me about him .
He was described as an absolute lunatic.
He'd also lost his job for similar reasons.
My other neighbour was a barrister and represented the vendor in court .

When we last moved I left my old house absolutely pristine - you could have eaten your dinner off the floor! Arrived at the new place to wait for the removal can. Mum was with me (OH was in Nigeria on business). The new house was filthy. Mum was cleaning out all the cupboards before we could put anything away. The vendors had taken away all the curtain rails so I couldn’t hang the curtains. No light bulbs. And the garden - they had two dobermans. They had cleaned up some of the dog poo, but not all. They had also taken up most of the carpets and left thin old carpets with no underlay. Phew. We are still here and it is transformed.

In France it is now illegal not to disclose faults or omissions, with consequences if these emerge at a later stage. Pity the {out of date} law doesn't exist in the same what here. Surveys are sometimes [often?] a waste of money IMHO

Bukkie

We view during a lovely hot summer and it was only a month or so after we had moved in during October that we found out all the sealed units double glazed windows were running in water. The window cleaner informed us they had been like it for years and the units had failed a long time ago. The owner was a mad D.I.Y freak bit not very good so although everything looked nice on the surface and sailed through the survey. The most frightening thing of all though was a couple of months after moving in we had a log burner fitted. The gas engineer who removed the previous gas fire was horrified to discover Mr.D.I.Y had fitted it himself despite not being qualified and that carbon monoxide was present. I still shudder to think what might have happened if we hadn't decided to get the log burner.

Whew! re that unsafe gas fire!!!

There's no way he could have been getting that serviced yearly I would think.

I do remember in my last house that there was a gas fire in the sitting room (very effective it was too...) and I made sure I had it serviced every year. But there came a point where the gas guy said "You should have a ventilation grille for this - you havent". That was news to me - but one duly got fitted in the floor. Though nothing was said about having a carbon monoxide detector.

In my current house they didnt ask me - but just put one up on the most obvious sitting room wall - and I had to ask them to take it back off again (as I could see it clearly visible in my line of sight - ie looking ugly). So it's now on a sitting room windowcill instead.

The log burner was illegally installed and had never been swept. Our Heating engineer refused to touch it! We replaced it immediately. The teenage son’s room had a wall of blown plaster hidden by a huge poster.

My back garden is one bit of my garden they basically didn't trespass in - and I havent mentioned my back garden???

. I caught one of them trespassing in one of my side gardens twice and frequently mucking around in it (ie moving my garden furniture). I frequently caught them trespassing in my front garden. There is no route to town or anywhere else in any of my garden. It's all very clearly mine/just mine - and I have all the legal paperwork since Year Dot to prove it. It's now even more clearly all mine since I've emphasised the fact it's mine (with very very obvious boundary features/my cameras/my gate). One bit of my garden was stolen off me by a neighbour (it's on my title plan! but they asked the Land Registry to have it taken off there and put on theirs instead....but they didn't expect the rejoinder they got for that - eg a very large bill attached to that bit of my land is no longer mine to pay.....they got the bill too...as well as that bit of my land).

So - yep....the vendor carefully didn't let on that two of the neighbouring houses were Trouble and there was a risk a third house would decide to become Trouble as well once it got sold onto someone else...